The Other New Girl: A Novel

PROLOGUE

I ENTERED FOXHALL SCHOOL IN THE TENTH GRADE. IT WAS a coed Quaker school at a time when coeducation outside of public school was uncommon enough that only a few private schools offered it. Quakers had always treated women as equals—sort of. The school was founded for boys and girls from Quaker farming families in Pennsylvania; a state founded by William Penn, himself a Quaker, or Friend as the denomination was known, for The Religious Society of Friends.

Starting as a sophomore set me apart from the first day. There was only one other new sophomore girl that year. Her name was Moll Grimes. Everyone else had established their cliques and chosen roommates the year before so we were odd girls out from the start. I was stuck in a small, single room on the second floor of Fox, which served as the dorm for most of the girls, as well as housing the school offices on the ground floor, along with the dining hall, and assembly room above it.

The view from my window looked out onto a wide, gently sloping lawn that gradually became the long fields where girls practiced field hockey and lacrosse. Beyond those fields there was a flat grassy area at the end of which was the outdoor theatre, a grass stage about six feet higher than the field, where outdoor graduation was held every June, weather permitting. Behind that grass stage, flanked by huge old oaks, the Foxhall woods spread out and curved around, meeting the Nonnahanny River beyond, on whose banks I would come as close to losing my virginity as possible without technically altering my maidenly status. I was fifteen and arrived at Foxhall both happy and unhappy to be there.

ONE

Hello Again

TWO WEEKS BEFORE HER DUE DATE, I GOT THIS FRANTIC TEXT from my daughter: com rite away labr strtd. So at the last minute I wangled a flight standby from D.C. to San Francisco then took a cab straight to the hospital. Everything was going about as expected, but the baby just could not make the final push and that’s when the grueling wait dragged on while hour after hour an increasing dread hung over the birthing room.

After twenty-three hours, I wanted to scream at all those hospital workers in soft-soled shoes solicitously padding around, For God’s sake wheel her to the OR and get the baby out. Can’t you see she’s in agony?

But my daughter had insisted on natural childbirth and refused to give up. Being an invited guest I kept silent, even when I held her husband in my arms to keep him from slumping to the floor while he sobbed into my shoulder. After it was all over, a bloodstain the size of a VW Beetle covered the floor under her bed. I never want to go through anything like that again. They named the baby James Joseph after both his grandfathers and we immediately dubbed him JJ.

Finally, with little JJ safely cradled in my exhausted daughter’s arms I left, dragging my paltry carry-on, and headed for a nearby hotel. Outside, morning fog hovered over the city creating a powdery gray dawn but it was turning blustery with glints of sunlight just breaking through, a ghostly sort of indecisive morning where passersby appeared out of the mist. And as I walked down one of those steep San Francisco hills there was Daria McQueen, an apparition heading straight toward me, her face half hidden behind a fluttery print scarf. When a burst of wind blew it sideways, wrapping it across her neck like a small sail taking a hard tack, we made eye contact and both of us stopped abruptly. I hadn’t seen her or heard anything about her in forty-five years. And then, suddenly there she was.

Even after all the time that had passed, I could tell it was Daria right away but was surprised when she recognized me, too. Later I would have to sort through how I felt about seeing her again and I guess that’s why I’m telling this story. But in the moment, what with the night I’d had, I was dazed, not sure how to react. I had never fully come to terms with the event we’d both lived through so many decades before. This chance meeting went way back, to everything that had happened when I first met Daria at Foxhall School.

Greenwood, is it you? She peered intently at me in that searching way I remembered.

She’d asked that same question once before, long ago, and the memory of it had stayed with me, popping up in my mind now and again. Daria always called me by my last name back then and it stuck like a tack. For the entire first year, no one called me Susannah, or my mother’s pet name for me—Suzi. I learned early on that everyone always fell into line behind Daria. She had some kind of power over us. So, to her, Greenwood it still was, although I’d been married for decades and no one had called me Greenwood since I left Foxhall School.

My teen years had been a mix of wonderful discovery and terrible insecurity. That first semester, when I was a new kid at Foxhall, left me even now wondering if I had done the right thing. Because really, sometimes it’s just not clear where the line falls between right and wrong. The decisions that can change the course of a life are like a maze with all possible exits leading to endless paths of uncertainty.

And now, there was Daria again. At sixteen, she was the girl who seemed to have everything we thought worth having. Beauty, brains, a sharp wit, a girl you hoped would like and accept you because just being around her meant you were accepted . . . somehow special.

Even though I hadn’t thought of myself as Greenwood since those battered years at prep school, I answered, Yes. It’s me, and raised a hand to shield my own face from the wind. Then I said, Daria. How are you? because I didn’t know what else to say but, after all that time, probably I did want to know. Anyway it was what you said to someone you hadn’t seen in a long time, even if just seeing that person disrupted your equilibrium and suddenly made you feel like a child who was not sure how she was supposed to behave around adults. There was nothing I wanted less on that glorious morning than to be pulled backward to a time when I didn’t yet know who I really was or what I would become. I had no idea how resilient I was, nor, at the time, even knew what that word meant.

Not a simple question to answer, she said. So like Daria to keep you guessing. People don’t change. Some soften. Some harden. But we all come with our pieces pre-arranged. That’s not to say bad decisions don’t lead to bad outcomes and good ones can’t make you relatively happy. Still, we are who we are. Looking back at the choice I made at fifteen, would I do the same today? Probably, but I can’t say for sure. That river swept past me long ago and all the possibilities of those years were gone.

Daria suggested we catch up at a Starbucks on the corner. There was always a Starbucks at a nearby corner these days, no matter where you were, even out there where it could just as well have been a Peet’s or a Philz, because coffee was common in San Francisco now the way head shops were when Daria and I were young, back in the sixties, the decade of our coming of age. So off we went, propelled by the wind but also by the passage of time that begged to have its blanks filled in like those little ovals on an SAT test.

We ordered—a skinny mocha for her, a chai latte for me—and sat at a small table on not too uncomfortable wood chairs. We dropped our bags and jackets and then, well, it seemed neither of us knew where to start. It would have been an awkward moment except that Daria started to giggle like a girl.

You know, she said, I never really believed you told us the whole story.

So there it was. Right at the start. About what? I asked but I knew what she meant. It was as if we had leaped back in time, back to Foxhall School and that suspicious, aggrieved time when we didn’t fully trust anyone, especially ourselves. I suppose I was testing her, or myself, wary of being too eager to reveal anything that might hurt. But she’d been on my side back then. She hadn’t even been upset by what happened. Everyone else had been in shock. But not Daria. She was just as detached as a runway model strutting her stuff.

About Moll and Miss Bleaker. She said it matter-of-factly, as if she’d been waiting all these years for me to divulge the truth. Before I could consider an answer, she went on.

Did we ever find out why she was named Moll and not just plain Molly? I mean what a name for a girl. Sounds like some old, black-and-white, B-movie gangster girl. She giggled again.

She’s nervous, I thought, and then dismissed it because it seemed inconceivable that anything could ever have made Daria nervous.

She told me it was a combination of both her grand-mother’s names, I explained. Why did I remember that? It’s mystifying what your mind holds onto as you age. Mona and Lillian. But I remember telling her that calling herself Molly would make her fit in better. Seems utterly stupid now.

Back then we all operated inside our own little spaces with invisible walls. We only knew what anyone allowed us to know or what we admitted to or shared. We were close in an artificial way because there we were, stuck at Foxhall School, a microcosm with its distinct reality. Over the decades, I’d had to unlearn the unspoken rules that guided us at Foxhall. I’d had to relinquish the cynical elitist attitude I learned there. It was not what the school taught us. In fact, just the opposite. But it was what the situation required. Or at least what we imagined we needed for armor.

Well maybe that was afterward, she said. But before, you know, before we even knew who she was, when her name was Moll and she was a nameless, gray girl who melted into the background, you know? I mean you were the only one who ever talked to her. We all called her ‘the other new girl.’

I remembered it all. I never spoke up back then, to tell them not to call her that. Never told them it was cruel not to use her name, even behind her back, because people always found out in some way. If they didn’t hear it, they sensed it and that could be even crueler than knowing something for sure. A suspicion could eat away at a young girl. Especially if she was not pretty like the others, and she didn’t fit in anywhere.

I think I became a better person because of Moll. Over the long run anyway, I said.

When she said nothing I asked, How much of it do you remember?

I’m not sure, she sipped at her skinny mocha and it seemed to me she was being evasive about her memories. Or it was possible she really didn’t remember. Maybe both.

Enough. Or maybe not enough. It was all so long ago. It shouldn’t really matter anymore. So much else has happened, she said.

It mattered to me. All those years later. I wondered, too, what in her life made her think what happened with Moll was trivial.

But I mean, really, do you remember what it was all about? The details of it.

She smiled and tilted her head in just the way she used to when she was about to deliver a zinger that made you feel about two inches tall.

Sex, power, religion. What else is there?

What about love? I must have sounded like a naïve child. And at my age. Well, maybe it was better to get more naïve as you age. Cynicism could weigh you down. I’d learned that at least.

I wouldn’t know, she said. And I think your old friend Moll wouldn’t either. Her reasons would be different from mine, I’d bet. She certainly wanted love. Everyone wants love and some people will do anything to get it. And some people who deny they want it, will do anything to keep others from having it.

She meant Miss Bleaker. I was sure of that. We were cruel back then. I really meant she could be cruel but I didn’t want to say that. And, besides, cruelty was a system that fed on our need to be accepted and we could all be cruel in the teen years.

I don’t know about you and the others but I certainly was. So she said it for me anyway, and I did not disagree. I’ve paid my dues, though. Maybe not enough to make up for all that . . . she stumbled over the word and then added, mess.

I was cruel, too, I thought. But not the way she meant. Yes, I did talk to Moll. And yes, I did step outside of our little circle of cool girls. But I did not stop what happened and then someone was dead and someone else was lost forever. Where does blame reside? I don’t know the answer to that. Daria called it that mess. As if you could dismiss life and death as a simple mess.

TWO

The Makeup Room

I MET DARIA MCQUEEN IN THE FIRST WEEK AT FOXHALL. She was hard to miss and impossible to ignore in that sequestered community.

Going away to boarding school—prep school it was called by those who felt it necessary to designate exactly what rung one belonged on in the social strata—was looked upon by the girls I was leaving behind at my all-girl day school as something of an oddity. We were in eighth grade, a temporary way station between childhood and high school when girls were figuring out what was important to them. Clothes, boys, makeup, in any combination. Why would you want to go away to boarding school, they wondered. At our girls’ day school we wore gray uniforms and, when I told the girls I’d be going away to a Quaker school, they asked, Are you allowed to have zippers in your clothes?

That’s Puritans, I explained but it didn’t stop there. They wanted to know about buttons and if I had to wear black all the time and why would I subject myself to that when I could stay at home and wear whatever I wanted. It would have been useless to point at our uniforms, since the minute the girls were off school grounds they’d change clothes, apply makeup liberally, and meet up with boys. They also wanted to know about Quakers being against procreation. I would sigh and say those were Shakers, not Quakers, but the distinction seemed lost to them and after a while I gave up. When I told them it was a coed school they said, Oh, well, that’s okay then. In those days, only Quaker prep schools were coed except for one progressive school up in Vermont, which my parents considered with suspicion as possibly socialist. Heavens.

Sometimes girls back home went away to prep—always to sister schools associated with some elite boys prep school— but none had ever gone to a Quaker school before so I was a trailblazer and an oddity they looked upon with skepticism and confusion. Not a good combination in eighth grade, so I was not unhappy to leave. In truth, I was not doing well at the girls’ school and my home life was a mess. My parents wanted to get me into what they called a better situation. Translation . . . I’d better do well at the Quaker school that was billed as a caring, supportive, and family-like environment, or else. This did not address the messy home life for which I was not responsible but that never seemed to come up in any of the conversations around the dinner table about my so-called lackluster grades or behavioral infractions. When I look back now at my school reports, all of which my mother saved, I am amazed that my grades were actually quite good with one glaring lapse in algebra, which to this day makes no sense to me. And my teachers seemed to like me, according to their comments. But nothing I ever did satisfied my mother. So the impression left was of a slacker who was not living up to her potential. How one pre-measures potential was always puzzling.

At Foxhall I took the place of a girl named Ursula who’d been expelled at the end of her freshman year for sneaking a local boy into her room late one night and getting drunk with him. Or maybe they were already drunk before she let him climb the tree outside her room and come in through her open window. It had happened in the spring, the four girls who took me under their collective wing told me on my eighth day at Foxhall.

I’d arrived at Foxhall in a tentative state, my parents having driven me all the way from Connecticut arguing about something trivial that I tried not to listen to by reading in the back seat, which only made me feel queasy. My mother was starting to act weird again and when that happened she would pick on me. My father would defend me and they would go at it, leaving me caught in the middle and left out at the same time. By the time we’d unloaded my stuff and said good-bye so they could get back before dark, I was glad to be on my own, angry that they’d left me to whatever fate was waiting, and terrified I’d be shunned for being new. So when four junior girls took me under their collective wing, I didn’t ask questions or try to figure out why. I was happy to be absorbed into their clan, relieved to belong somewhere, especially if it meant being designated a cool girl.

We had all stayed up past lights out and gone to the makeup room behind the auditorium stage. The room was only supposed to be used for dress rehearsals or during plays but girls sometimes snuck in there after lights out to study or just to do what teenage girls do late at night—talk about boys, other girls, hopes and wishes. Once there, we would gaze at ourselves in the long mirror above the makeup table that ran the entire length of the back wall and point out our facial flaws.

Brady’s hair was thick and unmanageable. My eyebrows were too low. Poor Jan’s mouth curved to one side, especially when she smiled. Faith had not enough of a chin and her palms had a skin condition that flared up when she was stressed. It was nonsense, of course, because we were all pretty. But at our age none of us was thrilled with the images we saw gazing back at us, as if that mirror had been borrowed from a fun house and told only a distortion of truth. All except for Daria. She was gorgeous and everyone, including Daria, knew it. No mirror could dispute it, and the rest of us could only sigh and think how easy it was to be Daria, as if beauty was a key that would open any door.

I was in a kind of confused state during those first days at Foxhall. Plucked out of my familiar pond at home, out of the only bedroom I’d ever known, the house where I’d grown up, the school I’d been driven to since fourth grade, even the uniform I wore, that I’d gotten used to hating but that allowed me to dress five days a week without thinking about what to wear and what everyone else was wearing and what was acceptable and what I would look like and what the others might say about me or think of me. And boys. Now there were boys everywhere I went. At meals. In the halls. In classes. At the library. On the playing fields. They watched us and hooted at us and talked to us and followed us. I didn’t have any idea what to wear, how to act, what to say. Whatever these girls wanted from me, I would be a willing participant. If only they would like me, accept me, make me a member.

In the makeup room, they told me about the expelled girl, Ursula, whose room I’d been assigned. She’d been on the outside as they termed it. I understood right away that simply including me in the retelling brought me inside and that was a major coup for me. It was also made clear that since I was the new girl, I had a lot to prove and that night set the wheels in motion. Just to be spirited up to the makeup room after lights out was a sign that I was being tested for membership in their club. I learned later that Daria had set it up, told the others to get me alone and find out what I was made of, if I was worthy of inclusion and how far I’d go to prove it.

The boy Ursula let through her open window was cute, they said with knowing nods and raised eyebrows. A townie whose father ran the local farm store, a successful enterprise as far as a local business could be looked upon by us preppies as worthy. In those days, farms still surrounded Foxhall. The land hadn’t been plowed under and gouged out by developers. So he wasn’t the kind of poor that would have made him untouchable. Still, he was not one of the boys from Foxhall. Those were the boys we were supposed to date and eventually marry—or boys just like them maybe not from a Quaker school, but from other, more traditional schools.

But, they told me, she shouldn’t have done it. At least not that way. The girls were not so much offended that she’d taken up with the cute townie, who was nineteen and rumored to be experienced, a code word for sexually adept. No, they were more put off by the way she’d done it.

She should have waited for the weekend and gotten a pass to town and met him on the sly. Maybe under the railroad trestle. Or in that big culvert where the Nonnahanny stream ran quietly enough, if there hadn’t been any rain, to walk inside and sit down on the corrugated metal with the huge old sycamore standing guard at one open end of the tall tube. No one would have seen them in there and they could have gotten drunk and done whatever they wanted. No one would have known. They were still trying to figure out why she’d taken the risk of bringing him into her room.

I don’t think she expected to get caught, said Jan.

Of course she didn’t expect it, Brady made a face at Jan. Who would? Especially on that day.

Well, it was pretty odd letting him climb the tree and opening the window, Jan argued. She was just stupid.

Daria ran her fingers through her curls and sighed. I know, the night before graduation. I mean she was a junior so it wasn’t her graduating. But still . . . she wanted them to find her. I’m sure of it. She almost waved a red cape at them.

At who? I asked and was sorry the minute the words were out.

They all turned to look at me and I could tell by their smirks that I should have kept quiet.

Who do you think? asked Jan.

I shrugged and looked down at the makeup table in front of me but I could feel them all watching me.

Them, said Brady. The Foxhall behavior squad. The system. The deans. All of them. She hated them. Daria’s right. She wanted to get caught. She wanted to get out of here and go back to public school to finish up. She wanted to get her license, to drive and go where she wanted, and not have to get permission to go to town or sign out or any of the stuff we have to do here. She didn’t want to be a chicken cooped up in a cage anymore.

Later, I came to understand it. She wanted freedom. She wanted to get caught so she wouldn’t have to quit the school on her own. This way, she’d be free to move on and the mark against her would only matter to her parents. She’d feel liberation to their shame. It was a bargain